So my teenage daughter has been yelling at me a lot lately, and it’s all because of our new pooch.

We got this fluffy white dog from the pound in June, because my daughter insisted she just had to have another beast, in addition to Buddy the Wonder Dog.

Some people have told me he’s a Bichon Frise, and I like this idea because those dogs cost over a thousand bucks from a breeder, and it means we got a bargain.

However, other readers have suggested he’s just a GWD, a “Generic White Dog,” and that may be true, too.

In the spring, Curly Girl brought home an adorable puppy that she’d been given as a rescue. But she didn’t take care of him, so he had to go live with a family that did.

Meanwhile, my teens kept pestering me to get another dog, even though Buddy is 14 years old now and still quite spry for his age.

My son, Cheetah Boy, was in favor of a new dog, but he wanted a huge dog that would scare potential robbers. For this reason, he wasn’t allowed to go to the pound with me to look, because he kept picking out mastiffs and pit bulls and then grumbling when I said “No.”

Big dogs eat a lot and then excrete a lot, and I didn’t want to deal with it on either end.

I picked out an adorable little black-and-white terrier who looked like she could star in her own movie. She may have been the cutest dog who ever lived.

But the people at the animal shelter require you to bring in your current dogs, to see if they get along with the new pet, and for some reason, this animal just hated Buddy on sight. She wouldn’t stop growling at him, like he was Donald Trump and she was Rosie O’Donnell.

So that deal fell through. But then Curly Girl found this walking ball of fur who’d clearly been living on the streets for months, because he was all overgrown and matted. You could barely tell there was an actual dog under all that filthy fluff.

He was shaking so hard and terrified of everything that it took the shelter workers 10 minutes just to get a leash on him. But when he finally got out onto the lawn with Buddy, they didn’t hate each other.

We decided to bring him home.

I arranged to have him bathed and clipped before he was neutered, paid $153 in fees, and we drove over to fetch him at the vet’s the following Monday, after his puppy-siring years had been abruptly cut short.

We were fully expecting the new dog to be cowering in terror, as he had been in the shelter, especially after being groomed, shaven and snipped in his personal, private places.

But, from the moment we picked him, he was obviously so happy to be in someone’s lap and going home, he couldn’t stop licking my daughter. He made it clear that he owned her, and also every square inch of his new house.

To placate my son, who wasn’t happy that our new dog weighed only 14 pounds, we named him Lil Wayne, after one of his favorite rappers.

That name has the added benefit of identifying the age of anyone who stops to greet him, because older people invariably think he’s named after Wayne Newton, whereas younger people laugh, because it’s so incongruous to have a small, fluffy white dog named after this notorious rapper.

The interesting thing is that Buddy ignored the younger interloper when he first moved in, but eventually succumbed to his youthful enthusiasm.

Even though Buddy, a long-haired Jack Russell Terrier, never cared much for other dogs, he and Lil Wayne now play together like brothers, and he’s so much more energetic and full of life, it’s a wonder to behold.

Lil Wayne is as cute as an animated stuffed animal, and wants nothing more to sit on your lap and lick you every minute of every day. But he has his challenges.

And he’s a bundle of energy, so much that it’s like raising a 2-year-old, appropriate because he is actually around 2.

Curly Girl just started taking him to Doggie Manners classes on Saturday morning, which is why she’s been yelling at me.

When Lil Wayne jumps on me 127 times a day, I tell him to “Get down.”

Apparently, that’s bad. I’m supposed to just tell him “No.” Because “down” is a different command.

“Stop telling him that!” she will yell at me. “He won’t know what to do!”

I think to myself, “Well, I know what to do, which is beat the tar out of you for yelling at your sainted mother, who does everything for you.”

But I don’t say that, and I’d never beat the tar out of her anyway, not even if I knew what that expression meant.

She’s been telling me that I need to train this dog, too, and I suppose that’s true, because when she moves out, I’ll probably be stuck with him.

Marla Jo Fisher was a workaholic hard news reporter before she adopted two children from foster care at age 46, picked up a scruffy dog along the way and somehow managed to keep them all alive, at least so far. She now writes the Frumpy Middle-Age Mom humor column that appears in the Orange County Register weekly. Due to her status as the cheapest person alive, she also writes about deals and bargains for the Register, including her Cheapo Travel column which also runs in newspapers around the country. When she's not having a nervous breakdown, she's usually traveling somewhere cheaply and writing about it.

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